


To Protect By Killing

by inkandpaperhowl



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: CFSWF, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-27
Updated: 2017-07-27
Packaged: 2018-12-07 19:04:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11629935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkandpaperhowl/pseuds/inkandpaperhowl
Summary: Jedi Knight Kaladin has been plagued by a disturbance in the Force since the Sith murdered his brother. It draws him to a derelict space station where he must choose between what he wants and what is right.





	To Protect By Killing

“No signs of life,” Kaladin translated the binary beeps of his astromech as she scanned the derelict wreckage of the space station before them. He leaned forward to glance out of the viewport as he punched the button to dislodge his small ship from the hyperspace ring. He frowned, closing his eyes and reaching out with his senses—there had to be a reason the Force had sent him here, of all places.

“Check again, please, Syl,” he said, agitated. The Force revealed nothing to his curious prodding, but there was something _off_ about this place. Something...uncomfortable. SYL-4NA chirped as her scan finished, and Kaladin sighed. Her repeated scan had the same results as the first one. “Guess we’re doing this the old-fashioned way, then.”

He guided the tiny ship around the space station, careful to avoid the debris floating in a shattered cone exploding from the side of the old metal hulk. He found an airlock and clamped on, SYL-4NA magnetizing the landing struts to the hull of the station. She whirred and beeped in concern, but Kaladin smiled at her over his shoulder. “I’ll be fine, Syl. You stay with the ship—keep the engine running, but on auxiliary power. If anyone else _is_ here, I don’t want them knowing where we’ve docked.”

SYL-4NA’s beep sounded exasperated, but she didn’t eject from her booster seat.

“It’s not that I don’t trust your scans,” Kaladin said placatingly. “Of course I trust your scans! I just...there’s something wrong here. Be careful.”

SYL-4NA chirped insistently.

“Yes, I’ll be careful, too, Syl.” Kaladin’s grin slid off his face as he turned away from the little droid, and he took a deep breath, settling his emotions. The Force was a riot around him, stirred like clouds in the passage of a ship; ripples shuddering out from this broken station pounded through him like a headache. He took several deep breaths, meditating lightly as he slipped through the airlock and into the space station.

They’d docked on an angle, and it took him a moment to realize that he was looking down the shaft of the sideways hallway as the airlock door balked at being opened. He pushed the door aside, reorienting himself as the dregs of the artificial gravity caught him and pulled his feet slowly down to the floor. He scanned the station, noting the low power it was running on—the shields were still alive, and life support was fine, but gravity, lights, and pneumatic systems like doors were barely functioning. He closed the airlock behind him, taking another deep breath and reaching out.

He still felt no signs of life, nothing in the Force but himself.

He cursed under his breath and ignited his lightsaber, the steady, blue glow lighting his way better than the fitfully flickering lights embedded in the walls every few feet. SYL-4NA beeped softly in his commlink, telling him she was doing periodic sweeps of the hyperspace lanes around them, so he’d have some warning if they were going to have company. Kaladin murmured his thanks to her and dove deeper into the space station, his footsteps echoing slightly in the empty halls. It got colder the further he moved from his ship, and somehow that seemed to mean he was going the right way.

_Isn’t this amazing, Kal?_

Kaladin turned at the echo of a voice, so familiar, so impossible—but there was nothing. The wavering light of his saber illuminated more empty hallways, and he turned, continuing deeper in. He could feel the looming break in the station just on the other side of the wall, where something had caused it to explode outward. He pressed a hand to the freezing metal, grounding himself in the chill.

_I can’t believe we’re here! After all that time in hyperspace!_

“It was only a few hours, Tien,” Kaladin murmured, just as he had all those years ago, when he and his brother had arrived at the Jedi temple. Tien had bounced down the long, red-carpeted halls with more energy than a herd of lothcats. Kaladin had trailed behind him, staring up at the austere architecture with a mixture of awe and trepidation. Master Plo Koon had put a hand on his shoulder and looked down at him with kind, smiling eyes.

“He will do well here, I think,” the Jedi had assured him, and Kaladin had taken heart. “As will you.”

Looking back, Kaladin always wondered if Master Plo had known what would happen and was trying to convince himself as much as his new apprentice.

_It felt like a lifetime—come on, let’s go! I’m not going to wait for you forever!_

The echo of his brother’s voice startled Kaladin again, and he lashed out with his lightsaber unthinkingly, slashing at nothing. Childish laughter ghosted down the corridor and Kaladin forced himself to stop. He closed his eyes, sinking into the Force and letting it guide him. The cold of this empty place filled him, chilling his bones. The laughter came again, sending a shard of ice shivering down his spine.

“Why did you bring me here?” he muttered to no one and nothing. The Force was silent, and the broken space station was empty, and Kaladin tried not to think of his own silence and emptiness as he rounded a corner and the hallway spilled out through battered blast doors into a massive, wrecked hangar.

It was clearly the nexus of whatever explosion had destroyed the station—one wall was blown completely to bits. Scraps of metal and torn-apart ships, broken containers and twisted hovercarts floated gently behind the flickering, faded shields that had dropped in place when the explosion had cleared. Scorch marks and melted, twisted slag littered the remains of the cavernous room. Kaladin hesitated at the broken blast doors, eyes narrowing at the shields, wondering if they would hold or if he was about to be sucked out into space to freeze, explode, and die.

“Syl?” he called softly into his commlink. Her eager beep was a comfort after the ghostly echoes of the space station’s empty halls. “Can you plug into the station and see if you can route any more power to these shields in the hangar? I don’t fancy dying.”

“No one really does, do they?”

Kaladin jumped, falling into a defensive stance, his long lightsaber held like a spear before him. The child’s laughter echoed again in the back of his mind, a sharp contrast to the dark figure that pushed itself away from the far wall. What he’d though to be a blast shadow resolved into a man in dark leather, arms folded across his chest, dark hair cut close to his skull to reveal several long scars scratched across the left temple and back around the side of his head.

“Miss me?”

Kaladin blinked. The Force wavered before him like a heat mirage, drawing him down into the cold, dark hollow in his heart he thought he had buried. Like a broken holoreel, static images of old memories burst across his mind—a laughing boy bounding down a dim, grandiose hallway; a tiny brown hand extending a shiny rock toward him; a green lightsaber flashing in perfect, offensive strikes as he defended; a flash of red in a dark tent and a scream; a soft curl of dark hair slowly soaking up a small pool of blood.

Kaladin heaved himself out of his own memories like a drowning man breaking the surface of the sea. He gasped, bracing himself against the broken blast doors, and lowered his lightsaber threateningly at the shadowed man on the other side of the hangar.

“You’re not him,” he choked out.

“I thought the Jedi were good at letting go,” the man said, amused. “No attachments—isn’t that the rule? But here you are, still burning up with guilt over something from so very long ago. Has the Light not shown you how to forgive yourself?”

“It wasn’t my fault,” Kaladin said automatically, the words Master Plo and Master Yoda and everyone else at the Temple had repeated so many times that they had become the rote answer to his emotions, the shivering chains holding his grief tightly bound in that dark knot under his heart.

The man threw his head back and laughed. “You don’t really believe that. I can feel it. So can you, if you bother to look.”

“It wasn’t my—”

“Wasn’t it?” the man interrupted. “Nor was it Master Plo’s, surely. I’m sure he’s forgotten about me. Not one to hold on to things, after all. He certainly didn’t hold on to you for very long. Pawned you off on some other Master for the end of your training, and made you a Knight too soon. Hm. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he did feel guilty for letting the Sith get past him, and knighting you made him feel better about it all. At least one of the brothers he plucked from obscurity too late to train would make it. One is better than none, I suppose.”

“How do you know all of this?” Kaladin ground out through clenched teeth, stepping forward into the cold hangar to meet the man halfway. The crater from the explosion that had ripped the station to shreds lay between them, a deep hollow in the floor that neither of them seemed willing to cross.

“You were never very good and hiding your feelings, brother.”

“Don’t call me that,” Kaladin hissed.

“Careful, you must be of your anger, young padawan!” the man said, voice twisting into a mockery of Master Yoda. “Anger leads to hate, and a dangerous path to the Dark Side, that is.”

“Why are you here?” Kaladin shouted, drowning out the laughter of the dark shadow on the other side of the crater—laughter that doubled too easily with the warm excited mirth of the child in the hallway of the Jedi Temple. “ _How_ are you here?”

“I came in a ship, brother!” the man said brightly, clapping his gloved hands together in excitement. “Hyperspace is still so amazing.”

“Stop it.”

“Not until you say you’ve missed me.”

Kaladin took a deep breath. The man watched him with glittering eyes, and buried behind the mockery and the mirth there was still a small, bright child looking up at him with a genuine grin and a shiny rock to cheer him up.

“You died, Tien,” Kaladin said quietly—too quietly, but the words hung in the still air of the empty hangar like heavy stones in a river, and the Force flowed around them, carrying them to the other man anyway. “I didn’t save you.”

“I didn’t die, Kal.” His voice was flippant, dismissive, as if he were pointing out the obvious. As if this wasn’t the first indication Kaladin had ever had that his brother was still alive. “I mean, you didn’t save me, though. You got that one right.”

A hand drifted down to his belt, and the man who Kaladin couldn’t—wouldn’t—think of as Tien drew a lightsaber from the folds of his dark tunic. A flash of broken-hologram memory—small hands gripping the shiny, silver hilt of a blade that seemed too large for them, too dangerous for them—crossed Kaladin’s mind. But this blade fit his brother’s hand perfectly, and when he ignited it, it was deep, blood red.

“I don’t really want to fight you, you know,” Tien said evenly, his scars lit from below with ugly, red light. “So just give me the droid and say you never saw me, and go back to pretending I’m dead so you can wallow in self-pity and useless, misplaced guilt while you run errands for Plo Koon like a sad puppy.”

“The droid?” Kaladin blinked in confusion.

“Didn’t you know what you were stealing when you brought her with you on this unsanctioned mission? She has a copy of the list embedded in her rusty innards, and I really don’t think you want to know what my masters will do to me if I come back without it, so please, Kal. Just give me the droid.”

He said it so casually. So simply. As if he didn’t find it important or concerning—as if he didn’t think that Kaladin would find it concerning. As if he didn’t think that Kaladin would care.

“What—” He hesitated, unsure how to ask the question, but knowing that he needed to, if only to make sure Tien knew he cared. That he had never stopped caring. “What will they do to you?”

“I said you wouldn’t want to know,” Tien repeated, and though his tone was still bright and jovial, he spoke quietly, and his hand shook slightly before he clenched it into a fist. He pressed his lips up into a smile that seemed to bear more pain than any tears ever could. “Don’t ask me. Please, Kal?”

Something inside Kaladin broke. For close to a decade, he’d assumed his brother was dead. That the Sith who had slunk into their camp like some creeping smoke had taken him and the two other younglings and had murdered them for their potential. He’d thought that he had failed to keep his promise to protect his brother, that he had gotten his brother murdered. It had hurt, but it had been easier than thinking of him alive. For if he was alive, then it meant this: pain, torture, the twisting of a bright, warm boy into a monster. The destruction of a child who only wanted to visit the stars.

It had been easier to think of him as dead, because that meant he was no longer suffering. It had been easier, because that meant that Kaladin could sink slowly beneath the waves of his grief and do nothing. It meant that Kaladin could become that thing that cared for nothing and desired to help no one. It meant Kaladin could throw himself into his training and become something that protected, that didn’t fail to protect. It meant he didn’t have to be a person. He could simply be a Jedi.

But Tien’s voice was a quiet, shattered version of itself, and his eyes were dark and full of a clouded anger, and that scornful, mocking humor spilling from him was a shield against the world. A mirthless wall of deflection that kept whatever else was still alive in his heart from being discovered. A survival tactic just as successful as Kaladin’s automatic mantra of empty words. The Light Side, it seemed, had been no kinder to him than the Dark Side had been to Tien; though his pain had been self-inflicted.

They had both been so excited about hyperspace, the first time they left home. They had been so ready to go find the stars. Where had they lost that, along the way? How had the Force swept them up like a riptide and torn them apart like a maelstrom and spit them back out as empty shells of the laughing boys they had once been? It swirled around him now like a seething foam, hissing between the rocks of his emotions, whispering for him to let go.

But he couldn’t. He had never been very good at the no attachments rule. 

“I…I can—we can go, Tien,” Kaladin said, the words spilling from him before he could think about them, before he could stop them. “Just leave. We have ships, and an entire galaxy. We can just…leave. Like we always said we would. Go find the stars.” 

For a second, there was hope in Tien’s eyes. For a mere instant, the dark humor was replaced with childlike hope. And Kaladin suddenly understood how Tien had survived. That despite the pain and the torture and the training, that no matter how the Sith had twisted the Force inside him and inflicted it upon him, somewhere deep down Tien had always believed that Kaladin would come for him.

SYL-4NA beeped quietly through his commlink. A ship was approaching. She didn’t think it was friendly.

Tien’s eyes darkened, and the curve of his smile turned sharp and mean.

“It’s the list of Force-sensitive kids, isn’t it?” Kaladin asked SYL-4NA, resignedly. She whirred apologetically. “Why didn’t you say anything?” And before she answered, he knew, and understood why Yoda had said nothing when he’d requested the time to find the source of the disturbance in the Force that had been tugging at him for years, and why Master Plo had given SYL-4NA to him when he left. They both knew him better than he did himself: give him a list of children to protect to make up for the one he’d lost, and perhaps, if he saved enough of them, he might eventually forgive himself. It was a plan that might have worked had Tien actually been dead.

Then again, he was never going to let that list fall into Sith hands. Not if he could prevent it. Not if he could stop other children from suffering the tortures Tien had endured. Not even if he had to fight his brother to save them.

He reignited his lightsaber and leveled it at Tien even as his breath hitched in his lungs in something between fear and sadness. “I can’t let you have them,” he said, voice far steadier than he expected.

Tien’s sharp smile did not falter, and his eyes were filled with fire, and his anger pulled at the Force around him so hard Kaladin _felt_ the moment the last of Tien’s hope died.

“I always knew you’d never save me,” he hissed, his words striking at Kaladin like lashes of a whip. “You would always pick them over me.”

“I’m—” But the protests died on Kaladin’s tongue. If he denied it, he’d be lying. And he’d hurt Tien enough already. Tien sneered, and launched himself across the crater, lightsaber aimed for Kaladin’s heart.

Kaladin reacted automatically, instinctively. He stepped aside at the last moment, his own lightsaber coming up to block Tien’s strike in a flash of incandescence, and another and another as he attacked and parried and fought. He wanted to close his eyes, but he couldn’t. His training didn’t let him. He wanted to forget he was fighting his brother, or pretend it was just a spar in the temple, like training in the old days, but he couldn’t. Every move was as familiar as his own body, every strike as calculated and powerful as his own, every step a mirror of his. He wanted to forget this was his brother, but his brother didn’t let him.

It wasn’t a duel. It was a desperate plea for forgiveness. It was a decade’s worth of bottled up anger and guilt spilling out like a fuel-leak in hyperspace, burning magnificently even as it dragged them down. It wasn’t a duel. It was a violent embrace. It was two brothers trying to speak when neither knew what to say or how to say it. It was two brothers who had forgotten how to be brothers trying to remind themselves of who they used to be.

It wasn’t a duel. It was a death throe.

It wasn’t a duel. It was a small boy bouncing down a long, red-carpeted hallway in excitement while his older brother watched him and smiled.

Kaladin’s lightsaber skidded against Tien’s as he spun away in the opposite direction, the longer reach of his weapon giving him the advantage as Tien was forced to leap, Kaladin’s saber skimming the melted slag beneath him. Tien replied with a flurry of feints and blows, stunningly fast, and Kaladin didn’t even try to block them; he flipped backwards, using the loose gravity of the dead station to launch himself higher, running up the wall briefly before gravity reasserted itself and he landed lightly on the floor behind Tien, who broke off his attack to block Kaladin’s swipe at his spine.

It wasn’t a duel. It was a shiny rock placed just so in the palm of a hand, and the sound of laughter as a face tilted up to catch the rain on his tongue.

Tien growled in frustration as Kaladin leapt away again. He stalked forward, pulled the broken blast doors free of their moorings with an almighty heave of the Force, and flung them at Kaladin. He dodged one and sliced the other in half, ducking between the searing edges of metal. One clipped his shoulder, sending a jolt of agony down his arm. He almost dropped his lightsaber, but caught himself and caught the half of the blast door, spinning it back toward Tien with his own Force-push. He leapt after it, the metal concealing his movement, following it through the low gravity toward his brother. Tien pushed back against it, throwing it aside, and Kaladin let go of it, letting him, and dropped a vicious attack from above that Tien barely blocked.

It wasn’t a duel. It was the endless hours of practice in the temple, green and blue lightsabers clashing over and over again until they knew each other’s attacks and blocks better than their own names. Until they could fight in their sleep. Until no attack landed and no block missed and it became pointless for them to fight. It wasn’t a duel. It was a dance.

Tien cried out as Kaladin’s lightsaber bit into the wall behind him, the thrust pushed aside with the Force. Kaladin thrust again, and this time, Tien pushed him away with the Force, throwing him bodily through the air, back toward the crater at the center of the hangar. He followed after, red light throwing his scars into relief, illuminating the sharp smile still in place through the smoldering anger. Kaladin pushed himself back to his feet, shaking his head to clear it.

“You never came for me,” Tien screamed, and for half a second, Kaladin closed his eyes, breathed deeply, but the Force did not come to him to calm him, to reassure him, to absolve him. He was alone.

“You never came, and you promised you would!” The red lightsaber crashed against the blue one as Kaladin desperately blocked the devastating blow aimed for his neck. “You promised. And I _died_.” Kaladin couldn’t breathe, but he blocked, again and again, the blows coming too fast for him to counter. He retreated around the edge of the crater, but Tien followed, tears streaming down his face. “They murdered me, Kal. Look what I’ve become.”

It wasn’t a duel.

It was a mercy.

The shields flickered out. The whole station lurched toward the sudden breach as the vacuum of space tore at the air. Kaladin made a grab for a mangled, melted landing strut and used the Force to help himself hold on. Tien was ripped away from him toward the gaping hole in the wall, but Kaladin caught him, hand fisted around the Force as if it were a lifeline. He screamed as it tried to tear him apart but he held his brother fast from fifty feet away. He was never very good at letting go.

Just as quickly as the shields had gone down, they flickered back into existence. There was a retching groan from the station as it recycled air into the hangar at an accelerated rate. Tien crashed into the crater with a thud as the artificial gravity kicked back on. Kaladin reoriented himself on the edge of the blast zone and found himself looking down at his brother. Tien was bleeding, clutching an arm where he’d landed badly on his shoulder.

He had saved him, but it didn’t matter. Tien looked up at him, eyes dark and empty. “They’ll destroy me,” he said, voice dead and tired. “Please, Kal.”

“Tien,” Kaladin called the warning even as he saw his brother pushing himself to his feet, red lightsaber still ignited. Still ready. Still hungry. “I have the high ground. Don’t—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Tien said, almost too quiet to hear. “Either way, I win.”

He leapt.

Kaladin’s body moved almost of its own accord. He saw the opening, and his body turned, his lightsaber thrusting up at just the right moment, even as he closed his eyes and tried so hard not to breathe. Not to think. Not to exist.

It wasn’t a duel.

It was the scent of burning flesh and a weak scream of pain and Tien crumpling to the ground, sliding down the curve of the blast crater to die in the hollow in the floor of the cold, empty, dead space station.

Kaladin leapt down after him, landing lightly, numbly beside him. He knelt, gently picking up his brother and turning him over so that he was facing the shielded vastness of space and all the stars. He held him quietly, numbly, tracing the scars on the side of his head, carefully closing his eyes, draping his tunic so that the burning stab wound was covered. He held him, Tien’s head resting in his lap as if they were children again, laying on the roof when they were supposed to be asleep, counting star systems they were going to explore. He closed his eyes, and forced himself to breathe. He did not look for the Force. He was content to be alone.

His commlink beeped once. Twice. More insistently. SYL-4NA’s binary voice pleaded with him in concern. The ship was still coming and it still wasn’t friendly.

“It’s all right, Syl,” he said quietly. “I’m on my way.”

He waited a few more moments, in the hollow in the ground, letting the broken-hologram stills seep out of his memory. The knot under his chest, the guilt wrapped up in tight chains of false platitudes and empty words slowly unraveled itself and drifted away on the slow waves of the Force. He wasn’t cold anymore.

He leaned over his brother and gently pressed a kiss to the scars on the side of his head. He stood up, carefully setting Tien’s head down, and then leapt out of the hollow. He made his way back through the space station, slowly growing warmer. He reached the rusty airlock where he’d docked his ship and climbed through it easily, ignoring the odd gravity disorientation as he landed sideways in the ship.

SYL-4NA beeped an excited greeting and then quieted at the look on his face.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll be all right.” He strapped himself into the pilot’s seat and turned to look at the little blue droid. She beeped at him encouragingly. He smiled.

“So, this list,” he said. She brought it up without prompting, her holodisplay flickering through thirty or so names and faces and dates and locations. He held up a finger as a small human boy with dark, curling hair smiled up at him from the recording. “Shall we start here?” he asked.

SYL-4NA chirped in agreement. The little ship pulled away from the space station, and Kaladin maneuvered into the hyperspace ring with the practiced ease of someone who had done this too many times before.

“Did I ever tell you, Syl, why hyperspace is my favorite?” Kaladin asked.

SYL-4NA beeped curiously.

“Because no matter where you are in hyperspace,” he said, keying in the coordinates, “you are going to the stars.”

He turned the ship and watched as the shields finally failed. The space station tore itself apart as the vacuum of space rushed in to fill its empty places with cold. He closed his eyes. He turned the ship again, and punched the button to engage the hyperdrive.

The stars stretched around him, fading from pinpricks to long, bluewhite lines.

Several hours later, he landed in an airfield outside a tiny farming town not unlike the one where he had grown up. He approached the boy’s parents first, explained to them that their son was Force sensitive, that this put him in danger, that he and the Jedi could protect the boy. The parents told him where to find the boy and believed him when he promised to keep the boy safe.

He climbed up on to the roof of the farmhouse and laid down next to the small boy with dark, curly hair, who watched him curiously with eyes far older than the rest of him.

“Cenn,” Kaladin said quietly, “would you like to come with me to find the stars?”

The boy smiled.

.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the most self-indulgent fic I've ever written, so I make no apology for anything. Suffer with me, nerds.


End file.
